AGRA & Monsanto & Gates, Green Washing & Poor Washing

Green washing = Public relations designed to convince people that biotech, genetically modified foods and agricultural chemicals, are environmentally friendly.

Poor washing = Efforts to convince people we must accept a program such as genetic engineering to increase yields to end hunger, reduce costs, and improve livelihoods of farmers and poor people. Poor washing has created calls for a “new” Green Revolution, especially in Africa, although there is little evidence that genetic engineering and agricultural chemicals, or moving farmers off their land, will realize any of these claims. There is mounting evidence of genetic engineering doing serious harm. Forcibly displaced populations always suffer harm.

In June 2008, the United Nations held a High-Level Conference on Food Security that gained much prominence in the midst of the food crisis and became a key venue to promote genetically engineered food as a solution to world hunger.
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Despite the overwhelming opposition to genetic engineering and chemical-input based agriculture, the biotech industry—with assistance from rich donor nations, multilateral institutions, and the philanthropic community—has used the food price crisis to gain support for GM crops. The result of the biotech industry’s well-financed publicity blitz based on “green washing” (biotech is environmentally friendly) and “poor washing” (we must accept genetic engineering to increase yields to end hunger, reduce costs, and improve livelihoods of farmers), have been calls for a “new” Green Revolution, especially in Africa.
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… AGRA is the biggest grantee of the Gates Foundation. With over $262 million committed, AGRA is poised to become one of the main institutional vehicles for changing African agriculture.

Key positions in AGRA are all held by people who owe their careers to Monsanto and the biotech industry:

In 2006, the Gates Foundation appointed Dr. Robert Horsch as the Senior Program Officer in the Global Development Program, which directly supervises the AGRA initiative. Horsch came to the foundation after 25 years on the staff of the Monsanto Corporation …

Another major player hailing from the St. Louis biotech hub is Lawrence Kent of the Danforth Center, an institute that is heavily funded by Monsanto. … Unsurprisingly, on January 8, 2009, St. Louis Post Dispatch reported that the Gates Foundation has awarded a $5.4 million grant to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, to “help the center secure the approval of African governments to allow field testing of genetically modified banana, rice, sorghum and cassava plants that have been fortified with vitamins, minerals and proteins.”

Lutz Goedde, another hire from the biotech industry, is the former CEO and President of Alta Genetics, and is credited with making Alta the world’s largest privately owned cattle genetics improvement and artificial insemination company. All three are working for the Gates Foundation, funding projects aimed at the developing world.

No African farmers, none, have been consulted for the foundation’s agricultural strategy. None of the reviewers or the external advisory board members is a farmer from Africa.

AGRA and the Gates Foundation speak about “land mobility” which means moving farmers off their farms so the land can be used for large scale mechanized agriculture. But there is no mention of where these people will go and live, and how they will be reemployed. What this means is thousands of displaced people moving to slums around the cities, which will grow and will be filled with unemployed people. This is politically and socially destabilizing. It breeds crime and political violence. This kind of policy also hits women particularly hard, because in western models such as corporate agriculture, their traditional rights to land are ignored. Women are the majority of agricultural workers, and will become even more impoverished and disenfranchised, not that it will bother AGRA or Gates or Monsanto, as they say:

Over time, this will require some degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total employment involved in direct agricultural production.

People in Africa are taking action and speaking out.From: A Statement by Friends of the Earth—Africa at the Annual
General Meeting held at Accra, Ghana, 7-11 July 2008:

Members of FoE Africa from Ghana, Togo, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Nigeria, Mauritius, Tunisia and Swaziland met for five days in Accra, Ghana reviewing issues that confront the African environment. A particular focus was placed on the current food crisis and agrofuels on the continent.

FoE Africa groups deplored the characterization of Africa as a chronically hungry continent; and rejected the projection of the continent as an emblem of poverty and stagnation and thus as a continent dependent on food aid.

FoE Africa reiterated the fact that the agricultural fortunes of the continent have been dimmed by externally generated neoliberal policies including Structural Adjustment Programmes imposed on the continent by the World Bank, IMF (International Monetary Fund) and other IFIs.

FoE Africa expressed disgust at the manner by which the burden for solutions to every crisis faced by the North is shifted onto Africa. Examples include the climate change and energy crises wherein the burden has been inequitably placed on the continent. Africa is forced to adapt to climate impacts and she is also being targeted as the farmland for production of agrofuels to feed the factories and machines in the North.

FoE Africa resolved as follows:

1. Africa contributed very little to climate change and the North owes her an historical debt to bear the costs of adaptation without seeking to further burden the continent through so-called carbon finance mechanisms.

2. Africa must no longer be used as a dumping ground for agricultural products that compete with local production and destroy local economies.

3. Africa must not be opened for contamination by GMOs through food aid and/or agrofuels.

4. Africans must reclaim sovereignty over their agriculture and truncate attempts by agribusiness to turn the so-called food crisis into money-making opportunities through price fixing, hoarding and other unfair trade practices.

5. We reject the promotion of conversion of swaths of African land into monoculture plantations and farms for agrofuels production on the guise that some of such lands are marginal lands. We note that the concept of marginal lands is a cloak for further marginalizing the poor in Africa through their being dispossessed and dislocated from their territories.

6. Africa has been subsidizing world development for a long time and this has to change and African resources must be used for African development to the benefit of local communities.

FoE Africa calls on all communities of Africa to mobilize, resist and change unwholesome practices that entrench servitude and exploitation on our continent.

The Obama administration will put food security at the heart of its Africa policy, as it seeks to enhance ongoing U.S. efforts on trade, investment and HIV/AIDS on the continent, a top U.S. diplomat said.

“We want to see the food security initiative take on greater momentum as more African countries are drawn into this program,” said Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson, the administration’s top official for Africa.

“It is the first time we have seen such a powerful signature initiative come so quickly in an administration’s term in office,” Carson told Reuters in an interview. “This has been one of the fastest and swiftest starts that we’ve seen.”

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..he said Africans — some of whom have voiced disappointment that Obama, whose father was born in Kenya, has not devoted more resources to Africa — would soon see the food security initiative rolling out on a scale to rival major trade and HIV/AIDS commitments of previous U.S. administrations.

“While this food security initiative is global in nature, clearly its impact will have its greatest effect on Africa,” Carson said. “This is out and on the table already. No administration in the last four has come out so early with such a major initiative.”

“Africa knows that the era of military dictatorship is a part of its past and should not be a part of its future,” Carson said, adding that a string of elections in coming months, including in Sudan and Nigeria, would be signposts to the future.

“We think that the success of these elections will help to determine whether democracy is growing stronger and more vibrant in Africa or whether it has reached a plateau,” Carson said. “My impression is that democracy remains strong in Africa and that Africans want it and are determined and committed to trying to achieve it.”

why not include, among others, the coming “elections” in djibouti, ethiopia, rwanda or uganda, johnnie? or is “democracy” really code for something entirely different than “of the people, by the people and for the people”?

As Joan Baxter noted in the article trackbacked above, a wise and observant woman asked her the following question:

In the early 1990s, when I was living in northern Ghana, an elderly woman farmer decided that I needed some education. In a rather long lecture, she detailed the devastating effects that the Green Revolution – the first one, which outside experts and donors launched in Africa in the 1960s and 70s – had had on farmers’ crops, soils, trees and lives. She said that the imported seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and tractors, the instructions to plant row after row of imported hybrid maize and cut down precious trees that protected the soils and nourished the people – even the invaluable shea nut trees – had ruined the diverse, productive farming systems that had always sustained her people. When she finished, she cocked an eye at me and asked, with a cagey grin, “Why do you bring your mistakes here?”

And she answers it:

… the answer is quite straightforward many of those imported mistakes, disguised as solutions for Africa, are very, very profitable, at least for those who design and make them.

The mistakes just keep on coming. I did read something today in which Bill Clinton was apologizing to Haiti for destroying its agricultural base, particularly rice, but I really doubt that the policies will change. Here is the quote:

Decades of inexpensive imports – especially rice from the U.S. – punctuated with abundant aid in various crises have destroyed local agriculture and left impoverished countries such as Haiti unable to feed themselves.

While those policies have been criticized for years in aid worker circles, world leaders focused on fixing Haiti are admitting for the first time that loosening trade barriers has only exacerbated hunger in Haiti and elsewhere.

They’re led by former U.S. President Bill Clinton – now U.N. special envoy to Haiti – who publicly apologized this month for championing policies that destroyed Haiti’s rice production. Clinton in the mid-1990s encouraged the impoverished country to dramatically cut tariffs on imported U.S. rice.

I suspect these paragraphs are a throwaway and agricultural colonialism will continue with the same wrong headed energy that Carson extols.

GhanaWeb’s Say It Loud has been filled lately with a number of comments on Jatropha plantations pushing people off agricultural land in Ghana, cutting forests and native species, and poisoning the land and water with chemicals.

The agricultural initiatives really worry me. Our chicken farm suffers loss of potential profits due to the dumping of frozen chicken parts. It isn’t profitable, we can’t even break even growing broilers, chickens for meat, except for big occasions such as Christmas and Easter when people want to pay a bit more for something good. And things could get a lot worse. Look at agricultural development aid in Haiti.

The idea of “experts” coming in from outside, without extensive work and consultation with local people, and saying they have seeds better suited to a locality is ludicrous. It should provoke choruses of laughs at the combination of ignorance and arrogance. Instead poor washing disguises it as venerable and wise.

[…] of which are involved not only in the production of chemical inputs, but in the patenting of the genetically modified seeds that are being promoted by AGRA. These companies therefore stand to profit from the expansion of AGRA in […]

[…] of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). AGRA and the Gates Foundation have been criticized for working closely with Monsanto and its non-profit research arm, the Danforth Center, and promoting GMOs. Links and collaborations […]